My blog is relatively new and has become much more than I ever would have expected. I owe this to the various people and organizations I am nominating below for the Edublogs 2009 awards! I have learned by their examples. My knowledge as well as my passion for learning and collaboration I owe to them. Several others not on this list have also been influential.
My Nominations
Best individual blog- Kalinago English, Karenne Sylvester’s blog, has everything a blog needs from passionate posts to technology tips to controversial stances against the injustices in education! I’d also like to nominate Terry Freedman’s ICT in Education blog. He continues to write thought-provoking posts and provides useful tips for educators through his blog and other multimedia channels.
Best individual tweeter- Steven Anderson, @web20classroom, is an incredible representative of what an educator on Twitter should be. He is a close friend. He really cares about education and shares resources as well as helps as many educators through Skype. He does this in addition to working as the technology specialist for 19 schools. @Tomwhitby continues to inspire thought-provoking conversations which proves the 140 character limit is not limiting at all!
Best group blog- The Educator Royal’s Treatment, which is managed by Ken Royal, is a daily stop for me! I anticipate all the posts and have really had some great moments reading the various posts!
Best new blog- Ken Wilson has written one of the most compelling blogs that often reads like a novel. I would also like to include Marisa Constantinide’s blog, which is rich with teaching instruction advice and Tamas Lorincz’s blog which is thought-provoking and makes the educator deeply self-reflect.
Best class blog- Gelincik Grubu is a kindergarten class blog created by teachers in Turkey. They showcase the incredible work the children do which is an inspiration!
Best student blog- Adora Svitak is a 12 year-old prodigy who writes thought-provoking pieces such as how she feels befriending her principal on Facebook to poetry!
Best resource sharing blog-Several of my original posts began with links from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog. Rarely do I go a week without referring to a link within a post I found through Larry! I would also like to include Ozge Karaoglu’s blog, which has become a wonderful source of information to various Web 2.0 tools! Cybraryman also has a great website for nearly every subject imaginable.
Most influential blog post- Burcu Akyol has created one of the most influential blog series for educator’s professional development, Spread Your Knowledge. The Spread Your Knowledge series featured posts written from leading experts. Topics covered include getting published, how to tweet, creating a PRESTO, doing a presentation, blogging, and creating your own educational materials. I would also like to include the post by Scott Mcleod about Leadership Day 2009 which inspired several bloggers globally to blog about effective technology practices on July 12th.
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion- #Edchat is a discussion which has included over 400 educators, parents, student teachers, and administrators. Through #edchat various educators were able to debate a topic with the incredible education author, Alfie Kohn. I am honored to collaborate on this great project with Tom Whitby and Steven Anderson. I would also include #teachertuesday which is managed by TheEngTeacher who also manages to feed teachers’ blogs on Twitter.
Best teacher blog- Chickensaltash not only shares various resources in his blog, but he also shares how his students collaborate with other schools around the world. Chickensaltash’s work with Cool Earth is inspiring to educators. His work with schools in Peru and his travels as an educator in the rainforest earned him a nomination for the education Oscar’s.
Best librarian / library blog-Library Tech Musings by Gwyneth A. Jones is a treasure trove of web 2.0 tools and technologies for libraries. The blog is also highly visual.
Best educational tech support blog- If I need to know how to use a specific technology I visit David Kapular’s blog, Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyberhero. David has also published 6 free e-books to explain the various resources in his blog and has developed a wiki dedicated to these materials.
Best elearning blog- Elearning Learning has each of my favorite elearning blogs in one spot.
Best educational use of audio- Breaking News English by Sean Banville has over 1o00 audio files to support over 1000 current events. Each audio file is relevant, interesting, has supportive text, and exercises to accompany it! Moreover, Sean has pair activities for each lesson and even asks educators what news they would like him to do an audio file and lesson for!
Best educational use of video / visual- Russell Stannard has created several teacher training videos on various websites and nearly every web 2.o tool imaginable! TEFLClips by Jamie Keddie hosts various videos and accompanying lesson plans.
Best educational wiki- Ozge Karaoglu’s wiki reviews several web 2.0 tools in depth, provides excellent uses of Glogster, and showcases the incredible ways she uses web 2.0 tools with children.
Best educational use of a social networking service- The Educator PLN ning was created by Tom Whitby and continues to be one of my favorite places to travel daily to mingle with over 1500 educators! Additionally, Steve Hargadon’s Classroom 2.0 ning is a thriving community of nearly 35,ooo educators.
Best educational use of a virtual world- Edunation, which is currently run by The Consultants-E, is the place educators go to teach lessons, create educational materials, and attend conferences in Second Life. This mass of three virtual islands has been a safe haven for educators and free for all to use. It is also an invaluable source of professional development.
Lifetime achievement- Sue Waters has been the most influential individual in helping me develop my blog this year! All her websites, wikis, blogs, webinars, individual help, and virtual chocolates have helped make me pass the 5 month blogger mark!
New Categories
In the spirit of writing in nominations and candidates, I’m including the following categories and hope these will be accepted or considered as categories for next year. I hope giving awards for these categories will inspire more educational projects in these areas:
Best Virtual Conference- Heike Philp’s Virtual Round Table Conference had over 400 participants worldwide, 49 guest speakers, and brought together some of the best educational panels and experts for free! Educators even won over 3000 Euros worth of prizes and the entire conference took place online!
Best Example of an Educator Digital Portfolio- Ozge Karaoglu once again has shown what an excellent educator portfolio should look like. I encourage you to read her series on creating your own digital portfolio.
Best Webinar- Jo Hart, Phil Hart, Sue Waters, and Stony River bring us great webinars about various educational topics week after week for free! They deserve more than virtual chocolates. How about a virtual award?
Best Blog Carnival- Karenne Sylvester had an impressive blog carnival which included a slideshow of blogs and a poll. The Edge of Education carnival hosted by We Teach, We Learn was one of my favorites as well with quotes from each blog!
Absolute Best Readers in the World- You!
Challenge:
Make your Edublog Awards Nominations! Which sites and blogs have been influential for you this year?
I am on a flight returning home after a successful Presentation at the New York State Association of Computers and Technologies in Education Annual Conference, NYSCATE. I was pleased with the outcome, but I did make a few observations about how presenting at these conferences is beginning to change and may never be the same.
Presentations for any educational conference are the backbone of the conference. They are usually the main reason why educators attend conferences, wild parties notwithstanding. It is a great accomplishment for an educator to have a proposal for a conference presentation accepted and placed on the Program. Being judged and accepted by one’s colleagues is both an accomplishment and a thrill and for some, the process could also be terrifying. Presenting is considered by many to be one of those thresholds in an educator’s career. I have done several presentations at various conferences over the years and I have been moved by the positive experience with each event. Because it requires putting one’s self out there for all to see, most presenters do a great job of preparing and presenting to the best of their ability.
There has recently come a change for presenters that I just became aware of with my recent experience. I was at a keynote speech by David Jakes. He made a huge impression with his introduction to Augmented Reality. It was very cool. Jakes was engaging and informative, everything we have come to expect from a keynote speaker. He could have smiled more, but otherwise he was great. During his speech my Blackberry gonged. This was not a notification that an angel got her wings, but an alert that a message arrived. As I took out the Blackberry to turn off the sound, I thought I would sneak a peek at Ubertwitter. Twitterers understand the call of the stream.
I was amazed to find ten tweets about the very keynote speech I was watching. I could not believe how rude these audience members could be tweeting during a speech. I immediately tweeted out to these people. If they could be rude, I should be allowed to be rude too. I sent out about five tweets. Jakes received rave reviews from all the tweeters present. He deserved it, because he was excellent. I came away inspired by Jakes and terrified by Twitter.
The terror came in the fact that the next day I had to present my PLN Presentation and I knew many of those same tweeters would be in my room. I attended a panel discussion the next morning and there were over a hundred people in attendance. The Panel was again excellent and again several tweets went out saying so. In addition Tweeters were quoting the pearls of wisdom from the panelists, word for word. I had two hours to go and no pearls of wisdom from me were even on the horizon.
The idea of a Twitter test entered my mind and now I had another standard to meet. Not only did the presentation have to be accepted by educators in general, but it needed to be accepted by Tweeters specifically. In my mind’s eye I envisioned my three thousand followers opening their Twitterstream and seeing a tweet “Whitby sucks in Real time” or worse “RT: Whitby sucks in Real time” GLOBAL sounded in my brain. Even Europe, Asia, and Australia will know I suck in real time.
I showed up in my room early and of course, the technology that we tweet about all the time, let me down. The computer screen appeared sideways and it was the same on the projection screen as well. A frantic call to the tech folks scrambled three techs to the room. Any more than one is a problem, since there is not one opinion but three to resolve the problem of the sideways screen. I am a dead man in the eyes of the world. It was time to start, and I could not wait for the fix, so I began the presentation. Shortly after my introduction, the techies came through and the projector and computer were up and running with a picture in the correct orientation.
Somehow I managed to conceal my fears until this public outing in this Blog. The point that I think needs to be made, however, is that twitter, or whatever app is to follow, will forever change the way we receive Presentations. Hopefully, Twitter will force us all to do better or be exposed globally. A real concern is what about those twitterers who don’t get it and tweet out bad stuff about the speaker with little regard for reason or feelings. Twitter will have a significant effect on presenters and presentations. Maybe we should ban it?
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Tom Whitby is a Professor of Education in Secondary English, Linkedin group founder and owner of Technology-Using Professors, TWITTER-Using Educators, as well as NING-Using Educators.>
Have you ever come across a tweet you wanted to share? Check out this weekly series, What Did They Tweet? to discover valuable resources! Once again I have changed the format to provide you with the best way to see the resources. Please leave a comment to let me know if you prefer this format!
Tweetsgiving
What better way to celebrate this tweet series and Thanksgiving than by participating in Tweetsgiving! For more information, read this post. Basically, you tweet what you are most grateful for between Nov. 24th through Nov. 26th and use the hashtag, #tweetsgiving. You can also donate to the Epic Change organization which puts the proceeds to helping underprivileged students around the world as the video shows below. This event shared by @willrich45.
A great way to teach students about cyberbullying was tweeted by @technologytoday who had his students create a Wetpaint website dedicated to cyberbullying resources. The students displayed several powerful images and videos dedicated to stopping cyberbullying. Additionally, the students included a discussion forum!
Creating Phrases in Wordle & Screen Capture
Wordle is an amazing educational tool and @cheimi10 shared an incredible tip via Twitter. Read his post to find out how to create phrases in Wordle. I’ve included his video tutorial on how to screen capture the Wordle, because it is one of the best video tutorials I have seen!
A Quote for Educators
I’m adding my own tweet to the mix, because it included an image from Anne Hodgson’s presentation at the BESIG conference in Poland. I have included Anne’s slide which includes this quote by her co-author, Carole Eilerton, “Break a lesson into pebbles that the teaching and learning stream washes over and polishes.”
David Kapuler has created an amazing wiki dedicated to various Web 2.0 technologies. The wiki provides information on various tools, such as nings, blogs, and PLNs (personal learning networks). Below is one of the resources I discovered on the website, a video about PLNs. My favorite part of the wiki is that David has included his 6 free e-books that are amazing resources of various technologies.
Google Image Swirl
Google does it again with Image Swirl, a search engine for locating various images. Below is an example of what the image results were for my favorite artist, Marc Chagall, but really you have to try it out. The search engine is easy to use and highly visual. For more information read David Kapuler’s review and Richard Byrne’s review.
100 Twitter Tools for Students
Accredited Online Colleges has created a list of 100 Twitter tutorials and tools. The resources are geared towards students but can easily be used by educators new to Twitter. Categories include finding people, research, study breaks, discussions, building relationships, careers, and more.
Elearning & Web 2.0 Tools
Mindomono is a new mindmapping tool that has incredible features, such as embedding, adding images, adding links, and more! My favorite is the E-learning and Web 2.0 Tools mindmap created by Jesper Isaksson.
Language Links Library
Find over 100 fantastic links for learning languages at the CALL4ALL website. Categories include lists of text to speech sites, language podcasts, language learning blogs, language learning software, and more! There are various finds for teachers and students learning English or any other language.
Even More Cool Links
For a list of cool websites, check out Ozge Karaoglu’s series, Faves of the Week!
Challenge:
Leave a comment below of a way you could use one of these tools or websites in the classroom!
Part of any curriculum should involve goal-setting. Ideally goal-setting should occur at the beginning of the year and be a collaborative effort between students and teachers. Each year, I look for a better approach to getting students to really ponder their language learning goals. I finally came up with a lesson I enjoyed that you could use in January!
Student Motivation
Before students begin goal-setting, they should reflect upon their reasons for learning English. I used to just simply ask students to discuss their reasons for learning English. However, this time I introduced the topic by showing Lindsay Clandfield’s video! My students really enjoyed listening to the reasons why different learners feel learning English is important. The video is extremely useful in that students from various countries with different accents were interviewed. Additionally, the video includes word art of the responses so that students can read the responses while listening to them! My adult students and I really enjoyed the authenticity of the interviews, which is rare to find.
After watching the video, I asked each of my students to tell me which reason they thought was the most important for them to learn English. We had a round table discussion and the students were very responsive to the video. I was excited to see so much discussion on the first day with a pre-intermediate group of adult learners.
Ways to Study
Successful student goal-setting must translate into action. Therefore, I had the students work in pairs and read Berni Wall’s article, An A to Z of Effective Language Practice. The student pairs chose 5 of 26 tips to discuss. Each pair chose 2 language practicing activities they would most likely do or have accomplished. Each pair also chose 2 activities they could not picture themselves doing. Finally, they chose a tip they did not understand. Once again we had a very interactive discussion with each of the student pairs sharing their responses with the other student pairs. The least likely activity was karaoke. Most students admitted they were too shy to sing karaoke. Most decided they would practice their vocabulary, categorized under words.
Goal-setting Statements
The last step of the lesson was having students work on their goal statements. However, I first asked each student how to accomplish the chosen practice. For example, one student committed to increasing their vocabulary by doing word searches at least two times a week then looking up the words in a dictionary. This student’s goal statement looked like this:
I will improve my English vocabulary by doing word searches in the morning at least two times a week and writing down the definitions.
Another student chose to increase their vocabulary by reading an English newspaper and another by reading English news online. Others committed to singing English songs while driving and a few decided to listen to podcasts. I stressed to the students that I wanted them to establish manageable goals that fit in with their schedule. So far the students have stayed dedicated to their goals!
Challenge:
Have your students create learning goals. First, have them reflect on why learning the material is important. Then have the students collaborate in determining what actions they can take to accomplish the goal. Finally, have the students write down the goals and commit themselves to following through with these goals!
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